Film Review: Incendies

As I watched the Academy Award-nominated film Incendies (2010) last month, which my friend writer and translator N. had recommended, the impression I began to feel taking shaping was that I was observing the sort of movie Costa-Gavras or Gilles Pontecorvo might make if either had spent half his life watching telenovelas. I invoke the popular TV form, though without question you could go much further back in time and art to find plots turning on...

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J's Theater Now An iPhone/iPad App!

With immeasurable thanks to my partner C and his company CAC Digital Arts, I can now invite J's Theater readers who want to dip into the site on their iPhones or iPads to download the new, free J's Theater iPhone/iPad app!Everything you'll find on here is now available on the app version, along with direct links to the J's Theater Twitter feeds and easy-to-use sharing options for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GoogleReader, Instapaper, and other social...

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Quote: Alphonso Lingis

"When the scale of a human presence scattered across vast spaces seems unconceptualizable, as also the utter simplicity of certain gestures and movements seems undiagrammable, we have before a human body a sense of the sublime. The sublimity of a body departing into the unmeasurable spaces make the ideas we form of the superhuman and the divine seem like second-rate fictions. The sentiment of the sublime is a disarray in the vision, a turmoil in...

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Book Review: Jaron Lanier, "You Are Not a Gadget"

Jaron Lanier (Wikipedia)If I were to summarize Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), in a sentence, it might be: Freedom is more than the freedom to post your current meal on Facebook. To be fair, Lanier's book is a far more complex and nuanced reading of the contemporary digital world and social communications media than my epigram implies, but at the same time, it epitomizes at least part of his argument,...

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Other Countries: Black Gay Expression's 25th Anniversary Celebration at Summer Solstice

Gordon EasleyTonight I was fortunate enough to be able to attend what I consider to be one of the more important and exciting events occurring during this historic New York LGBTQ Pride week and weekend, Other Countries: Black Gay Expression's 25th Anniversary Celebration at Summer Solstice. It was particular important for me because Other Countries,  a Black gay male writing collective founded in 1986, played a key role in my own development...

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St. Mark's Bookshop In Trouble + e-Book Spamistry

If this summer you 1) happen through New York City, 2) are anywhere near the East Village or West Village, and 3) seek a book, particularly a work of distinctive poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, philosophy, literary or cultural theory, or magazines, zines, art books, and so on, please consider dropping by and shopping at St. Mark's Bookshop, on Third Avenue near E. 9th St., one of the best independent bookstores in the city, and one of the survivors...

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New York State Senate Passes Marriage Equality Bill!

Photo: James Keivom/NewsIt's official, and on Gay Pride Weekend, no less!New York State's Senate has just passed the marriage equality bill 33-29, ratifying the earlier affirmative New York State Assembly vote, and now it awaits Governor Andrew Cuomo's promised signature, which will make New York the sixth (joining Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia), and by far the largest state by population,...

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Quote: Quintilian

"While moderate and timely use of Metaphor brightens our style, frequent use of it leads to obscurity and tedium, while its continuous application ends up as Allegory and Enigma. Some Metaphors are also low--like the "rocky wart" I mentioned above--and some coarse. If Cicero was right to talk about the 'sink of the state,' meaning the foul ways of certain people, I am not therefore minded to approve the old orator's 'you have lanced the state's abcesses.'...

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Signs of the Strange Times (1 & 2) + Tim Parks on Translation

I always worry about being a Cassandra, I really do. I have to stop myself from photographing empty storefronts, going on about the unsustainability of the current low-tax safety-net-slashing agenda of both major parties, tweeting about every new revelation concerning how utterly the previous and current administrations have shredded the US Constitution (cf. Jane Mayer's extremely upsetting but revelatory New Yorker article on NSA whistleblower Thomas...

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RIP Taylor Siluwé + Armond White on Green Lantern & Stereotypes

Earlier today via Rod McCullom's (@RodMcCullom, Rod 2.0) Twitter feed, I learned of the passing of Taylor Siluwé, a fellow blogger, writer, NYU alum and Jersey City resident. A native of New Jersey's second city, he was 45. I think I met Taylor in person only once, a few years back, but I do have a copy of one of his erotic novels, Dancing with the Devil (SGL Café Press), had read his articles in publications like Out IN New Jersey and FlavaLIFE...

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46! + Riding the Roosevelt Island Tram

That annual day has arrived!The delicious strawberry shortcake C made for my birthday!The cake, with candlesMe blowing out the candles!***For my birthday I was trying to think of touristy places I'd never visited or things I'd never done (up to a reasonable point, of course) in New York City, and realized that I had done most of the things that would come to mind. I've visited all five boroughs, ridden every subway line, been to City Island, Coney...

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Bloomsday + Congrats to 2011 Grads!

It's Bloomsday!I have in mind, as I begin this entry, the President's recent visit to his ancestral homeland (one of them), Eire, and Mrs. Obama's sipping of real Irish stout in Moneygall.  SLÁINTE!"Terence O'Ryan heard him and straightaway brought him a crystal cup full of the foaming ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of the deathless Leda. For they garner...

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The Waste Land App

Whither publishing today, in this era of e-books and apps, and whither especially poetry publishing, which faces its own set of genre-specific issues? As Reggie H. (naturally) alerted me this morning by sending along the Guardian UK I cite below, the venerable British publishing firm Faber & Faber, in conjunction with Touch Press, an app development/publishing company, suggests through its extraordinary new offering one likely direction for the...

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